Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Price of a Bad Review

Librarian questions quality of a publishing house. Librarian publicly
criticizes said press on his personal blog. Two years later, librarian and
current employer get sued for libel and damages in excess of $4 million.That’s been the progression of events for Dale Askey, associate university
librarian at McMaster University in Ontario, where he’s been working since 2011.
At the time of his blog post, in August 2010, Askey was a tenured associate
professor at Kansas State University, where librarians are granted faculty
status. He said his comments about Edwin Mellen Press, since removed from his blog, pertained to his
work, assessing materials for potential inclusion in Kansas State’s library
collection in a time of diminishing resources.“It was, as such, my job to assess the quality of books, and I did so based
on many years of experience in the field,” he said in an e-mail interview. “As
budgets decrease, the necessity to be more discerning increases, yet libraries
have reduced their qualified staff numbers over the years. As a qualified and
experienced librarian, I was sharing a professional opinion for consumption by
peers.”Askey declined to say when or why he removed the post from his blog.
According to court documents, Askey’s critique was posted as “The Curious Case
of Edwin Mellen Press,” through early 2012, and referred to Mellen a “vanity
press” with “few, if any, noted scholars serving as series editors,” benefiting
largely from librarians not returning books sent for approval at “egregiously
high prices.” (In the suit, Mellen refutes many of these claims, saying its
average list price is lower than Askey alleged; that most books are sent out by
special order and not through approval plans; and that books are edited by
reputable scholars.)